Dear friends,
 
What I would like to talk about might be a bit controversial.  It has become clear to me that we humans are always looking for a way to explain sometimes complicated issues in simple easy ways.  Just look at the health care debate as an example of this.  Another example might be how we look at dog behavior.

 

I recently received a phone call from a gentleman who told me that he had just adopted an out of control pup who was terrorizing his kids.  He told me that while initially the puppy had been mouthy with him too, he had given the pup the "smack down" and showed her who was boss and she wasn't doing it with him any longer.  What he needed me to do was to help teach his kids how to be more "alpha" with their pup so that the pup would learn to be more respectful.  I spent the next 20 minutes on the phone with him trying to convince him that these were perfectly normal puppy behaviors and that better management and training might be a better way to go.  Teach the puppy that you control access to all of the goodies.  That's how you'll get compliance. 
 
I can't say as I blame the guy. We're all being spoon fed the same line. Turn on the T.V. and you'll hear dozens of stories about out of control dogs and almost all of this bad behavior is being explained away as dogs trying to test and dominate us. So rather than looking at things like chewing inappropriately, jumping and pulling on leash as normal puppy and dog behaviors, we pathologize them. You would think that our pooches had nothing better to do than to spend their evenings plotting coups and planning our demise. To show our dogs who is in charge, we are instructed to eat first, and to go through doors first.  We are told we need to be more firm (sometimes violent), more "alpha" and squash our dogs' efforts to control us. 

  

The idea of "alpha" comes from studies of wolf packs in captivity done in the 50's. The Monks of New Skete were the first to popularize the idea of asserting dominance in our human/canine "packs" to maintain order. The idea was that since dogs descended from wolves and wolves were thought to live in extended social groups, we humans could be more "wolf like" to manipulate the dynamics within our own "packs".  
 
The problem with the dominance theory is that it relies on really flawed science.  The studies that were done examined captive wolves and not wolves in naturally evolving social groups.  Many of these wolves came from different family groups from different parts of the country, many weren't related.  Essentially these were wolves from different families forced to live together in one social group.  Many ethologists (people who study behavior in the wild) suggest that rather than trying to extrapolate canine behavior from studies done on wolves, it might be more enlightening to look at feral (wild dogs) to see what kind of social groups they form and the dynamics within those social groups.  The problem is that feral dog groups is that it's usually just the breeding pair with pups until their grown enough to venture out on their own and thus the whole idea of pecking order and rank doesn't really apply here.  Ooooops!  Could this mean that perhaps our dogs aren't planning coups after all and just being dogs???? Don't tell anyone because the dominance theory sells a lot of books and tons of commercial time. It would put a lot of trainers and authors out of business.
 
If you are really interested in the evolution of dogs a great book to read is DOGS: A Startling New Understanding of Canine Origin, Behavior, and Evolution, written by Ray and Lorna Coppinger.  Ray is a biologist that teaches at Hampshire College in Ma. He is really one of the few scientists doing studies on feral and wild dogs.  It's a fascinating book.
 
I know there are probably many of you who are still skeptical.  Don't take my word for it,  do some research.  A good place to start is with Ray's book and here are a couple more links that might provide you with a bit more information. One is a page on Dr. Sophia Yin's website that uses video samples to debate the idea of dominance http://askdryin.com/dominance.php and the other is a position paper written by the American Veterinary Society of Animal Behavior.

 

Give those wonderfully bad dogs a kiss on the head for me. Enjoy the fall,
 
Elsa Larsen, CPDT